Roche’s drug Avastin performed well in the ovarian cancer studies but unfortunately failed to meet its endpoint in a gastric-cancer trial. Had the drug beat prostate cancer in this latest study, it was expected to add somewhere between 500 million and 1 billion Swiss francs, or $471 million to $943 million, potentially cutting sales forecasts by 2%. Roche will now be studying Avastin in earlier stages of the disease and in other tumour types.

Pfizer stopped a trial of the drug in advanced colon cancer. One of the new studies looked at Sutent as a first-line treatment with chemo in patients with HER-2 negative breast cancer. The other focused on patients who had been previously treated. In neither case did the drug significantly improve progression-free survival. Pfizer will continue to research Sutent as a treatment for solid tumours such as prostate cancer, non-small cell lung cancer and others.